


The Music Made Me Do It (Day 16: Neighbors)

by AsYouCommand (OminousHummingObelisk), SKINKWORKS



Series: AUgust All Year Long [5]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Audiophilia, M/M, Masturbation, Music Bootlegging, Musicophilia, Pet Sitting, Questionably-Consensual Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:46:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24420781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OminousHummingObelisk/pseuds/AsYouCommand, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SKINKWORKS/pseuds/SKINKWORKS
Summary: But seriously, how many crystal anemones does one mech reallyneed?In which a mech follows the perfect vocalist across the world while another mech stays home with the softbodies.
Relationships: Damus|Tarn/Pharma
Series: AUgust All Year Long [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763485
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	The Music Made Me Do It (Day 16: Neighbors)

Pharma did not expect Dissolution to turn up at his front door with an antigrav flatbed cart. Dissolution he had expected. Several dozen decorative rock parasites, not so much.

"Oh my," he exclaimed, struggling to keep his plastic smile on his face, "you certainly have a lot of crystal anemones. Quite a few more than I thought you would." 

"Well, you know what they say," the stumpy little ambulance said cheerfully, "you really can't have just one!" 

"They're not, ah, contagious, are they?" 

"Oh no. I have them all planted on crystals native to their natural biome. Nothing around here suits their rooting anatomy." 

"Ah. Splendid. Yes." 

"Too bad, though, isn't it? Imagine having a whole wall full of these little wonders! How pretty it would be!" 

Pharma bared his teeth a little more and imagined the carnage of him having to razorblade clumps of glowing tentacles off his drywall. If the things got into the wallspaces and started spreading through the building, he'd catch hell from his landlord and they'd never find Dissolution's body. 

His plating twitched when his old med school hanger-on grabbed his hand and began shaking it with earnest ferocity. "Thank you so much again for taking care of my little darlings during this training. It'll be difficult enough making it through all that material without having to constantly worry about them." 

"Well, good luck with it," Pharma replied, trying to subtly worm his fingers free from the affection. He'd attended the training the month before and had only survived thanks to his talent for defragging with his eyes open. "Difficult" was not a word he'd use for it. But, well, Dissolution was...Dissolution. 

His old chum pulled out a battered datapad and pressed it into Pharma's hands. "Here's a couple little care sheets that I wrote for them. The 46-screen one is the general daily care in text-only; the 128-screen one has the step-by-step photos. All the separate procedures are detailed in their own appendices. Just check the table of contents for the full listing. And please please _please_ contact me if anything at all is unclear. And you promised that you'd send me pictures every day? I absolutely won't be able to function unless I know that they're alright, not that I doubt your caretaking—" 

Pharma's life was full of regret. "No, no, no trouble at all." Was it worth it to burn down his condo to spare himself the misery of being enslaved by a huge colony of little glowing bastards for the next month? No, no, he'd suffered worse. Hopefully crystal anemones liked opera because it would be a nonstop concert in his place for the entire time that they were casting a shadow across his existence. 

Dissolution chattered happily as he pushed the flatbed into Pharma's hab and parked it next to some open wallspace. "Well, I'm sure that you need to get going," Pharma hinted when it seemed like the ambulance was actually attempting to make conversation. 

"Oh, let me just grab the supplies, then!" And he hauled in a second flatbed cart loaded down with esoteric devices and huge boxes of live food. He parked it right next to the first flatbed, causing Pharma's elegantly spare living room to look twice as small as it actually was. "Thank you so much again! You'll send me some photos later on tonight? Maybe a bit of video? I get rather anxious when I have to ride shuttles and looking at them would calm me right d—" 

"No trouble at all." Pharma firmly herded him outside. "Hurry back," he said with a note of despair as he closed the door almost in his old sycophant’s face. Any favors that he owed this idiot were officially paid back in full and surely it would be fine to never speak to him again after he picked up his squirming livestock. 

He turned around and stared across the room at where dozens of softbody mechanimals clung to their own individual decorative crystals, waving their tendrils around their sharp-edged feeding holes and emitting many shades of soft light. The anemones didn't stare back, because they weren't people and didn't have faces. He shuddered and opened the care sheet to the section on tong-feeding. 

* * *

Pharma had deliberately chosen to sit at a little table by himself in the hospital cafeteria the next day, the better to be alone with his own black mood. Thus, he glared piercingly at Threadwork when the other surgeon casually slid into the chair across from him with his cube as if he'd somehow been invited. "Not a good time, Doctor." 

Threadwork took a sip of his lunch and very casually propped his chin on an open hand in just such a way that the movement of his mouth couldn't be seen by the rest of the room. "Oh, but I think you're going to want to hear this, Doctor. Trust me." 

Threadwork was actually not a flake and a halfway decent surgeon, plus he was a fellow classical music fan. He was therefore actually worth paying attention to, and Pharma felt intrigued despite the new source of depression in his life. "I'm listening." He took a sip himself, following Threadwork's lead in keeping everything looking extremely normal. 

"You're a Desiderata fan, aren't you?" 

Pharma almost spluttered his lunch back into the cube, coughing heavily. "How could I not be??" he hissed, scrabbling for a napkin. "He vanished eight hundred years ago and that wound is still eight hundred years too new to call healed! No one before or since can touch him. No other vocalist deserves to inhale his exhaust! No— No other—" Words failed him and his hands shook as he wiped sparks out of the corners of his eyes. 

Threadwork smiled knowingly, mouth still incidentally hidden behind his hand. "Thought so. Have you heard that he's reappeared?" 

"No!" Pharma was doing a terrible job of looking normal, but at least he refrained from reaching across the table and shaking the other surgeon violently until the intel fell out of him. "What— When was this??" 

"Shhh shh shh. I have an inside source. Turns out that Desiderata dropped out of the public eye to join a monastic order and take a vow of silence. Changed his designation to Dewachen, wanted to be forgotten or some such nonsense. I suppose that he couldn't stay out of the spotlight forever, though, because he's coming out of seclusion and linked up with his old producers for a _world tour._ " 

Pharma pressed a hand across the side of his face to shield his stunned lack of expression from the rest of the cafeteria. Heroically, he kept himself from dumping his oil reservoir on his chair seat in shock, but only barely. His spark seemed to have frozen. 

"Now," Threadwork said after the most casual sip ever, "apparently he wanted tickets to go on sale very quietly, no fuss, all under his new name so the public wouldn't go berserk. But I have all the details, the list of all the dates and cities, the exact second when the sales go live. We medical builds have reaction times so much faster than any other civilian that we'll beat everyone else who got the tipoff if we're ready." 

"What do you want in exchange for all of this?" His frame? His spark? His undying slavish loyalty? All acceptable trades. 

"Maybe a favor in the future, but for now, consider it a gift to a fellow connoisseur." Threadwork smiled. 

* * *

Desiderata - Dewachen - was clearly not in the mood to break himself back in gently. Twenty concerts in fifteen cities over the course of the next month. Tickets went on sale on an inconspicuous day at an inconvenient microsecond, but as Threadwork predicted, Pharma's superior medical processor allowed him to beat every other shopper to the punch. Threadwork himself was only going to six concerts, but Pharma had gotten tickets to every last one and had all of his hotel and travel requirements booked ten seconds later. He was trembling all over when it was done. 

He still couldn't believe that this was really happening. Desiderata. Back after eight hundred years of leaving the world darker for his absence. 

He was so high on his success that it wasn't until he got home that night and saw the multicolored glow rising from behind his couch that he remembered his unwanted obligation. 

No rock parasite colony was worth changing his plans over - the damn things could shrivel in their own byproducts for all he cared - and Dissolution's tender feelings were similarly not worth his concern. However, Pharma hated to fail. He hated failing at _anything_ , and letting the idiot's pets die because he was essentially slacking off felt like a failure to him. It was unacceptable, but not because he actually _cared_ about it. Damn his unbreakable work ethic. 

Moving the colony to someone else's place was too much of a risk, so somebody would have to come to Pharma's hab and care for them. He supposed that he could hire professional petsitters, but they were...rather more low-class than he was and he worried that whoever he gave the access to would decide to help themselves to his possessions. Anyone who lifted any of his rare audio discs was a dead mech, but he'd have to go to the trouble of hunting them and their entire social network down on his own time, and he'd just rather not. A better solution would be to find someone in his own socioeconomic bracket who would, for some unfathomable reason, be alright with coddling squishy tentacled things for the next month. 

...Well, nothing to do but ask. And might as well start with the people in his building. 

* * *

Damus had accepted his place as the operation's high-security-clearance gofer. He sent his own daily reports to Megatron (perfect, brilliant Megatron) because Megatron (brilliant, perfect Megatron) wanted redundant reporting due to some risks involved in the op, but otherwise he was just there to listen to people's sparks and do assorted things that Soundwave's team couldn't be spared to do. Right now, he was sitting on a heavy-duty folding chair in the corner of the rented highrise condo, listening to a playlist of his favorite pastorales on his internal speakers while the security people tended the huge stacks of semi-portable equipment and infiltrated the heck out of the local infonet. Damus only had internal speakers because of the generous reframe that Megatron (scintillating, flawless Megatron) had authorized for him, so he was listening to pastorales _and_ swimming in joyful gratitude, which was his natural state of being nowadays. 

He picked up a spark resonance on the other side of the front door a couple seconds before someone hit the chime. Everyone in the room froze. No one was supposed to know that they were in there - had the op been compromised? Someone pulled up the hidden camera watching the outside hallway. Standing in front of the door, fidgeting a little, was a medical fast-responder jet. 

"Identified," Soundwave murmured. "Doctor Pharma, Surgeon First Class at Iacon Central Primalist Hospital. Next-door neighbor." 

One of the team members tilted his head, drew a claw across his throat, and quirked an eyeridge. Soundwave thought for a moment. Meanwhile, the jet followed up his chime with a tentative little knock. "I'll see what he wants," Damus volunteered. "Comm me if he needs to be disposed of." He turned off his music and got up to answer the door. A small, much-disliked part of himself cringed at the thought that he might be getting up to commit murder, but he crushed it back down ruthlessly. Megatron (flawless, scintillating Megatron) was absolutely worth a murder or two. 

* * *

Pharma was absolutely floored when half of the lovely double front doors of the suite opened and revealed the midsection of someone with biolights the color of fresh life-fuel. He had to crane his head back to look the person in the face, and as the person slid through the opening between the doors without revealing much of the home inside, he turned out to be...a tank? 

Tanks? In _his_ tower? Apparently, it was more likely than he'd thought. 

"Ah... Pardon me, but do you live here?" Maybe the tank was the resident's bodyguard or something. Shockingly, the warbuild's huge feet weren't dirtying the plush carpet in the hallway, so he was much cleaner than Pharma had expected such a person to be. 

The tank gave him a cool smile. "This suite is mine, yes." Shockingly again, he spoke with the elegant, crystalline tones of someone in Iacon's senatorial circles. Maybe he was some retired military hero? Pharma never bothered keeping track of such people. He hoped that his ignorance of the tank's military career wouldn't destroy his chances of handing off the crystal anemone husbandry to him. 

"I don't believe that we've ever met before. I'm Doctor Pharma. I live next door?" 

"Yes, I know who you are. I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance. Is there something that I might help you with?" 

At least he wouldn't have to figure out how to make small talk with a warbuild. "Yes, in fact. It's a bit of a strange request, however. Will you be in town for the next month?" 

The tank pursed his lips thoughtfully - what an oddly handsome face for a tank to have, not that Pharma was into his sort - and replied, "I shall." 

"Available on a daily basis, perhaps?" 

A frown now. "I think it would greatly depend on what you might be needing me for, Doctor." 

Pharma tried to keep himself from wringing his hands too hard. Not only was it undignified, but it was also a strain on his delicate internal joints. "Would you, perhaps, be willing to do me the immense favor of...caring for some simple mechanimals? They're really not difficult to work with, I promise. They're fully sessile, in fact." 

* * *

"...Perhaps you should show me," Damus suggested. He supposed that he should act like a proper upper-class neighbor in that he wouldn't brush off this upper-class twit out of nothing but pure annoyance. Not that the jet had really done anything especially annoying yet, but the fact that he was so obviously embedded in the ruling class made Damus' Decepticon sensibilities sting. 

[Threat assessment,] Soundwave commed. 

[Low, I believe, at least from the mech himself,] Damus responded as he followed the doctor back toward the next suite over. [It seems that he's going out of town and needs someone to care for his pets.] 

[Are they cute?] asked somebody else on the team. 

[Irrelevant,] Soundwave stated before kicking his subordinate off the channel. [Maintain comm contact and provide regular updates.] 

[Understood.] 

He really wasn't prepared for the mechanimals. "That's...more crystal anemones than I would think any person could possibly need," he judged reflexively. 

"Ugh, I could not agree more," Pharma said with a long-suffering roll of his eyes. "They belong to my coworker. He had to leave for a month, but, ah...something has come up for me as well and I'm absolutely unable to stay. I thought that perhaps a neighbor would be willing to help me out?" He let his eyes light up to make his charming smile shine even more charmingly. Damus wanted to hate him but was having an admittedly rough time of it for some reason. 

"Hmm." Upper-class people traded favors and such, he knew - in fact, they were less likely to do things out of basic decency and/or the goodness of their sparks than regular, wholesome folk were. "This will be quite the obligation, Doctor, even if they are immobile." He leaned down and stuck out a claw to prod at one of the soft little things. It wrapped a tendril around his finger and tried to pull it toward its tooth-lined orifice. A little creepy. [Not cute,] he reported back. He got a comm blip of acknowledgement. "Might you make it worth my while somehow?" He gave a charming smile of his own (take that, oppressor!). Perhaps he could get leverage for something useful to the operation. 

"I, ah..." The jet looked around a little helplessly, clearly aware that he was asking a lot. 

While he was dithering, Damus carefully extracted himself from the tiny predator's gummy grasp. Perhaps his neighbor needed a little more pressure. "Well, perhaps what has come up for you isn't truly important enough to run out on your obligations for. Your coworker would be terribly put out if he learned that you had abandoned his...unnecessarily expansive collection." 

"It _is_ absolutely more important," Pharma instantly snapped, his eyes blazing. "I certainly doubt that you know the significance, but it involves a vocalist known as Desiderata." 

* * *

Pharma flinched back a step as the huge tank whirled on him with a roar. " _Not know Desiderata??_ The palladium choir, the voice that has brought untold millions to tears?? The light that abandoned this unworthy world eight hundred years ago and took the very core of the vocal arts with him when he went?? No voice before or since could hope to equal him!!" 

"...You...know neoclassical vocal music?" 

Before the weirdness of a culturally-advanced warbuild could truly sink in, he shrank back yet another step when said warbuild advanced on him in continued fury. "You assume that, simply because I'm a tank, I could not possibly know neoclassical music?" he snarled. 

Pharma put his hands up soothingly. "I— I'm very sorry; I shouldn't have assumed. That was absolutely uncouth of me." 

The tank loomed quite terrifyingly. " _Tell me everything you know_ ," he rumbled in tones so strangely deep that they pulled at Pharma's spark like a riptide, as if they could somehow drag him down into the dark through sound alone. He rubbed at his canopy and coughed, trying to reset whatever was starting to skip inside his chest. 

"He's—he's come back. He's touring all this month. Twenty concerts. I have to leave tomorrow—" 

"He's...back?" The tank was poleaxed, his eyes glazing over. After a moment, he groped behind himself for something to sit down on and, thankfully, the sitting-room chair held up under the strutless slumping of that huge, armored body. 

"Yes." 

The tank stared at nothing for a few moments, then unattended sparks started to slip out of the corners of his eyes as he slowly began to smile. In that moment, Pharma knew that he had encountered a kindred spirit, no matter what sort of frame that spark wore. This one knew true art. "If only I..." His joy was beginning to fade to despair and Pharma felt an instinctive urge to protect a member of his tribe from starvation. 

"I have a full concert bootlegging suite installed in my frame," he confessed. 

The tank looked at him with a complete absence of judgement. "Music wants to be free." 

"I know! Right?" Even more of a kindred spirit than he'd thought ten seconds ago! Where had this warbuild been all his life?? 

"They must all be sold out by now. But you...you could bring it back for me." A kind of fanatic gleam was rising in the tank's red optics. 

Pharma darted a glance at the flatbed cart, reminding himself of what he was trying to bargain for. "I'm going to every single concert. I'll bring recordings of all of them back for you if you take care of these things for me. Just like it says in the manual, with a photo every single day. That's all I ask. And also...don't touch my things." 

The tank looked longingly at the wall of shelves packed full of audio media. "Not even your—" He blinked, zeroing in on Pharma's stereo. "Is that a Borg X77 M41.44 edition? They only made three hundred of those! Ahh, I have an X77 standard myself, but the dimensionality truly is superior in the limited—" 

"Alright, I'm convinced that you know how to work my stereo. So fine, you can touch that. Just...don't scratch any of the discs or anything with your—" 

The tank shot him an offended and horrified look. "I would die first. You have Octave first pressings over there." 

"You like Octave too? He's such an acquired taste." 

"Not as much as I like Speedcrest, I admit." 

"You— Do you have any recordings? I can't find them anywhere!" 

The tank looked smug and opened his mouth, but paused before he could speak. 

* * *

[Damus,] Soundwave commed him. [Equipment pickup necessary for schedule to be maintained.] Oh damn, he'd completely forgotten that a drop was supposed to have been made five minutes ago! The Cause was vastly more important than chatting with this disturbingly intriguing oppressor. 

"I need to go," he said, catching himself before he could gloat about his superior collection of obscure underground humcore recordings. "But yes, you have a deal." 

"Thank you!" The jet ejected a chip from a removable media port in his arm and offered it. "Entry codes and all my contact info. You've got the manual. Remember the photos and keep in touch if anything at all seems off." 

"Absolutely." He took the chip delicately between two clawtips and put it in his own port for a virus scan, not that he thought that a mech this desperate for something this weird was setting him up for a virus prank. "I will come over starting tomorrow, then." 

Starting tomorrow, he'd be able to get his hands all over that delicious stash on the shelves. His mouth was practically lubricating at the thought. 

* * *

Talking to Pharma that first night was not the most productive thing that Damus had ever done, but he endured it because his jealousy over Pharma's good fortune made him want to crowd up against the screen of his portable video communicator and...he didn't know, breathe in the air of someone who had just been in an auditorium where Desiderata's voice had blessed the ears of the public for the first time in eight hundred years. He wanted to push himself through the screen into Pharma's hotel room and crawl under his armor, as if the lingering resonance of that voice could still be ringing in the jet's struts, as if— He was completely irrational with craving for that sound, but he knew that if Pharma played any of it back for him, then it would be spoiled by the inferior audio pickup in the comm. To disrespect the work of the great genius so - it was one of the few sins that still mattered to the Decepticon. 

Pharma was utterly out of it, though, his face dreamy and a wild haze trapped in his eyes, his cheeks streaked heavily with carbon from the tears that he must have been shedding for most of two hours straight. Damus kept trying to get him to say something useful about what the experience was like, but he only got back useless half-speech like, "Good. So...so good. Just...so good," along with even more crying from the wrung-dry civilian. Granted, Damus could not imagine that he himself would have anything more coherent to say about a Desiderata concert (or Dewachen, he supposed it was now), as it was doubtless the perfect peak of goodness, a goodness so profound that nothing more could be said about it to break a reverent silence. He was so jealous that he could _die_ , but he tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that soon he would have all twenty concerts to listen to at the end of the month. He was capable of a little restraint. 

He jacked off in Pharma's shower after the call. It was just a little too much for him, that first time. But he was fine now. 

* * *

"I think I screwed the mech in the seat next to me," Pharma confessed with only a slight clearing of the loving glow from his eyes. "Or possibly he screwed me. It just sort of happened." 

Even after the sixth concert, he wasn't much more coherent afterward. According to him, the enforcers of every city had checked back in the records from eight hundred years ago and created specialized post-concert response plans intended to deal with thousands of crying mechs wandering around in the streets near the venue, totally incapable of speech and without a clue as to where they were. All of them had to be herded gently into holding areas, sobered up in various noninvasive ways, and then helped back to wherever they were staying. Practically the whole city had to get involved in keeping the aftermath of a Dewachen concert safe, which was making the uncultured parts of the populace extremely annoyed (not like they mattered). 

"...Is that technically consensual?" Damus asked doubtfully. 

"Yes," Pharma stated, blearily yet firmly. "Because music, consensus." 

"Alright, I suppose. As long as you don't feel taken advantage of." Damus wished that he could clang strangers at a Dewachen concert and not get arrested for it. Probably he'd get arrested simply because he was a warbuild, probably the only one in any given concert crowd. Damned elitists. 

He may have jacked off a little bit harder than usual in Pharma's shower that night. 

* * *

He didn't even know what to make of Pharma's tear-scorched declaration after the twelfth concert. (Still jealous enough to die, just _die._ ) 

"Do you know that there's a place that's so good and kind and good that everyone can belong there?" the jet asked him almost sternly, though his unfocused eyes weren't entirely on the comm screen at the time. "A golden place. The warmest, best place. Gentle. Peace. Forever." 

_Peace through tyranny_ , Damus' mind automatically supplied. He leaned in toward the little screen, wondering if he could see that place from here, if he could see it reflected in those eyes that had beheld the form of Dewachen wrapped in his music. Could tyranny be warm and kind? Perhaps so. Pharma was clearly being crushed under the merciless heel of tender musical domination. Megatron (wonderful Megatron) and Desiderata suddenly blurred in his mind and he felt something creak inside his skull and something moisten between his legs. 

"We all belong there, Damus. It's more real than here. It's more real than everywhere." Pharma was holding the screen so close to his face that only an eye and part of his nose were visible. He was starting to tear up again. "It's better than here, Damus. It's so gooder. It's..." His lids started drifting down over the blue of his eye and the screen started to jiggle in an oddly purposeful rhythm. "It's...it's so good. So good. It's so—" His ventilations were turning fast and ragged. "So good, Damus, it's so good—" 

Oh hell no, Damus was not seeing this, was not knowing that this had ever happened, was actively wiping the knowledge of it from his memory banks and reminding himself firmly (no, _not_ firmly) that this person was ruling class scum, worse trash than the worst Dead End leaker, the worst that ever— 

He didn't even bother guilting himself over it beforehand. He went straight to Pharma's shower and frantically jacked off twice in a row, plus the valve the second time, carefully thinking of absolutely nothing all the while. 

* * *

"Do I say anything strange when I call you after the concerts?" Pharma asked on one of his travel days between concerts, looking a little hung-over. "I do call you every night, don't I? Even after those?" 

"Yes, you call." Damus was deeply conflicted about whether he should tell Pharma anything about what he did after the concerts. Damus was sure that he didn't know the half of it, anyway. Pharma never seemed to remember a thing. Perhaps he wiped his memory banks the moment he surfaced from the bliss and just lived with huge holes in his memory. "Were you under the impression that you said strange things?" Nice dodge, him. 

"I know that I _feel_ strange," Pharma said, rubbing his head almost confusedly. Not for the first time, Damus wondered if it was possible for one mechanism to survive this much exposure to musical rapture in such a short span of time. Pharma seemed to be perpetually in a twilight state nowadays, caught between the worlds of mundane and perfected sound, always half-drunk on music. "Sometimes, I just... Things make me wonder if I'm a little out of it still when I call." 

"Perhaps you should be careful to get more sleep. Jet lag may be an issue?" 

"Har har, such a comedian." 

"Speaking of comedy, I listened to your Slidewhistle collected edition yesterday." While handling the grim task of shoving small, screaming mechanimals inside less small, non-screaming mechanimals. He understood why the tongs had such strange patterns of gouges on them now. 

"Oh Primus, please understand that that was a gag gift from a fellow classical music fan and I would never—" 

"And yet you kept it, even if you thought it was awful?" He smiled. 

"It's ultra rare! Of course I would keep it! It doesn't mean that I _like_ it or that I ever listen to it—" 

"Mmhmm, I see, I see." 

Damus didn't normally do this on the days when there hadn't been a concert, but...he jacked off in Pharma's shower. Something about the jet being irradiated by Dewachen's voice, becoming vibrantly radioactive with a sound that might be contagious, that might spread to anyone who came too close— And the concealed bootleg drives hidden under Pharma's armor, nestled beside his living components and filling slowly with glory and sweetness, perhaps even warmed by his sparklight— 

The rest of the operation team looked at him strangely when he came back into their suite that night. Perhaps he'd screamed a little too loudly. 

* * *

Pharma was grateful that at least it happened on a travel day and not a concert day. Everything was blurring together now, a smear of city streets and shuttles and hotels and long lines by venues and waking up tired and aching in odd places sometimes but happier than he could ever remember being. And the music...he could barely remember the details of it, the lyrics or notes, but that was alright. Those things didn't matter. Only the power of it mattered; only the great arcing wave of it, the hammer of bliss that shattered every innocent mech in crowd after crowd. He cared about nothing else right now. 

Unfortunately, he was forced to care about something else against his will when the daily photo that Damus messaged to him was accompanied by text reading, |Is this normal?| Oh slag. 

He scrutinized the photo, forcing his dazed brain module to intersect with consensus reality at a few more points than was normal for him these days. The anemones looked like they were starting to both swell and lengthen, their variety of soft color glows being replaced with a uniform bold red. He had a mostly-coherent conversation with Damus, who assured him repeatedly that he had been following the manual to the letter and who showed him a video feed of what the anemones were doing. It looked rather horrifying, a blaze of red light making it look like his suite was on fire, the light filled with pale, translucent tendrils that, according to Damus, seemed like they might be trying to fight or eat each other. He was stationed bravely at Pharma's place, wielding a variety of anemone-wrangling tools. 

Pharma scrambled for as many stimulants as he could find in his hotel room, trying to snap himself out of the musical haze that he didn't want to leave. He was finally in a fit enough state to call Dissolution and pretend like he'd just been at his condo and had to leave and something whatever and what was wrong with the anemones? 

* * *

Damus was just getting down the technique of sweeping various tools throughout the colony to keep the creatures from attacking each other when he got a call from Pharma on his internal comms. "Yes, please, explain what this is so I can make them stop. ...Wait, they reproduce _how?_ By—no, no, I don't— Well, you don't have to _tell_ me! ...You're blaming me for this happening in your hab because I took care of them _too_ well? I don't— Listen, as long as I know that I can just leave them alone then that's all I need to know. Congratulate your friend about his new future arrivals, then. ...Yes, goodbye." 

He stood in the middle of the living room, face twisted with horror and bathed in the furious red glow of fornicating tentacle blobs. Without his diligent intervention, they had all gone back to lunging at each other. Not out of hunger or hatred, though. No, it was something far, far worse. And Damus realized that they'd _touched_ him a little, on his hands, when he was trying to separate— 

In a change-up from what he usually did in Pharma's bathroom, Damus threw up in the sink. 

* * *

After the eighteenth concert, Damus sat huddled over the screen of his video comm and burned with savage jealousy as he literally watched Pharma stare blankly into the screen and rock slowly back and forth, possibly drooling a little, for more than five minutes on end. Oh, how he let himself hate, how he simply _hated everything_ because he could not be in that mech's place, that it wasn't _him_ who was haunting a hotel room in Polyhex like a ghost of the blessed dead. Damus wanted to be so mindblown from musical perfection that he could dribble on himself without the slightest shame. Damus wanted to be so overcome by glory that his mind dumped his motor management software and left him only able to rock...and rock...and rock. He tried rocking along with Pharma a little, but no, it was not the same. Goddammit, _it was not the same._

He was about to lean in closer and ask Pharma to just say something, anything, about what it had been like, when Pharma's soft, cracked voice whispered to him through the speakers. "Damus. I'm afraid." 

He blinked. "Afraid of what?" he asked, equally softly. 

"It wasn't just me." 

He waited for more, but there was only rock and stare, rock and stare, for another several minutes. Pharma's brow was furrowed as he struggled with thought. 

"I think...everybody was doing it, Damus. Not just me. I think...it's been everybody. All along." 

"What are you talking about?" 

Eventually, the video comm slipped from Pharma's nerveless fingers and bounced across the hotel room floor. There it remained, staring up at a patch of ceiling, until Damus cut the connection some minutes later. 

* * *

Damus was in Pharma's suite, pacing restlessly around the living room and hoping that Pharma wouldn't suspect anything about his shower after he got back - whenever the hell he got back. Taking care of the anemones hadn't been completely unbearable, but he was quite ready to give it up and receive his promised payment in exchange. Ohh, it would be soon. It would be _today._ He'd been able to clear the whole day with the observation team, saying only that he had to finish things up with their neighbor's pets before washing his hands of it entirely, and he'd already been in the shower twice just from thinking about it too much. _It would be today._

He perked up eagerly and rushed to the door when he heard someone unlocking it and pushing at it with feeble strength. He pulled it open the rest of the way and there was the medi-jet, hauling his wheeled luggage. He looked like he hadn't bothered to polish himself or smooth out the mysterious dings all over his frame for most of the past month. His eyes were wild and twitched as if seeing the invisible. He moved with careful, careful steps, as if he was unsure of where his body was. 

He looked like a vagrant and Damus would have been surprised that any respectable hotel or shuttle station would have let him on the premises, but he knew that they, like he, could see the aura of sanctity that hovered in the air around this battered creature. He was not a vagrant, but a humble pilgrim whose tottering steps trailed in the wake of divinity. The light of glory was in his feverish gaze. The pulse of wonder made his limbs tremble so. 

"Pharma?" 

The jet twitched and suddenly focused on him, squinting. "You're...big. Weren't you smaller? Before?" 

"You've been talking to me on video comms for most of the month. I'm sure that I looked much smaller." Pharma blinked up at him. "How long has it been since you fueled?" 

"I...don't think I know." 

"I'll get you something." Ordinarily, Damus would never stoop to food preparation for his so-called social betters, but this was a unique case. He tried not to dwell on how his own hands shook slightly and how the act of stirring a triple dose of stimulants into a cube of ultra-refined jet fuel (the breakfast of champions, Damus had always thought) felt like something holy, as if he were preparing a devotional offering for one who had beheld the mysteries to which Damus sought entry. He had to hold the cube with both hands as he carried it out of the kitchen and presented it to the doctor. 

Pharma mechanically lifted it to his lips and glugged down a third of it before he came up wheezing. "What the hell is in this??" 

"Health," Damus explained and gave him a hearty whack on the turbine to help his fuel-intake modulators remember which way was up. 

The jet managed to down the whole thing in between bouts of coughing and seemed to come back to himself quite rapidly afterward. "I need the recipe for that," he gasped. "And Primus, I look wrecked. I need a shower." He pressed the cube - a permanent, hand-blown glass one, not a low-class collapsible energy field - into Damus' hand and wafted away back through the bedroom door. 

"If you find anything that looks a little odd in there, I was washing out some of the anemone equipment earlier," Damus called after him. There was only a mumble and the sound of falling solvent in response. 

Whew. Safe. 

Pharma washed thoroughly - who knew when he'd last showered - and dried well enough, but was still in his battered state when he reappeared in the door to the living room. For a moment, they only looked at each other. "Please," Damus finally asked, softly. 

Pharma smiled and his hands began to break apart into all the tools of his art. With a chorus of little zipping and whirring noises, he began to detach his armor and partly disassemble the structures underneath. A minute later, after rummaging in his own internals in a way that left Damus feeling a little queasy, he pulled out a small, black, rectangular box and held it up with a triumphant grin and a slightly unhinged look in his eyes. "All twenty concerts," he said. "I've got three redundant copies inside me." 

Breath was shuddering through the tank as craving gripped him. "Please," he begged again, watching the jet with desperate eyes as Pharma crossed to his gourmet stereo and began pulling out various cords, hooking the drive up to the system. 

"I haven't listened to any of it myself, after recording it," Pharma said. "I still don't remember much. I only remember that it was...good. Just...so, so good." 

Damus' motor system was growing unsteady, so he sat down on the couch before he could fall down. As Pharma sat down next to him, he had enough presence of mind to warn, "Listen, don't let me touch any of the audio equipment now. No matter how I beg." Pharma gave him a puzzled look, but nodded nonetheless. And then the music started. 

One transcendent voice after another rose up out of the void of silence, weaving around each other as if growing architecture from air. He trembled and let his head fall back, wanting to lay himself utterly bare and vulnerable to the growing force of it - a delicate force, a soft force, so tender that it ripped past his every defense in moments and pierced him to the core. He felt it running along the insides of his useless armor, filling him. Pharma made a soft, strangled whimper next to him, yet somehow even that sound was woven into the music as if it belonged there. 

Damus surrendered and let the air pour loosely from his vents, staying empty and still for a moment before activating himself again, pulling the song in with the unimportant air. It hurt him, that sweetness, and he loved the pain more than wholeness. Beside him, a sob sometimes arose, always perfectly placed in the flow, a spice alongside the keen thrust of the sound. _Sublime._

How many moments passed, he had no way to know, but he began to feel as if it was not enough to stay still and listen passively. The vibrations filling him drove him, made him long to embrace them in motion, to—to make love to them and be utterly possessed by them. He leaned in, eyes closed, trying to press himself into the sound more deeply, wanting to embed himself in it— He was conscious suddenly of Pharma sitting next to him, knowing him only as another body in the grip of the song, one who wept quietly as Damus himself was weeping. He trembled, wanting something - a motion that they as listeners could share, a movement that belonged within the music, just like their tears and the whirling of their sparks. 

And then, on just the perfect note, Pharma leaned over and kissed him. 

They flowed together from that point, their limbs embodying the sounds, without any will of their own. Damus bared himself on the beat that demanded it, and when his cable swelled forth from his body, it did so because the rising of the towering voice pulled him along with it. Pharma descended into his lap like a crystal petal falling, following the humming undercurrent, and they joined and moved as the song moved them. Damus leaned back across the cushions, his body arching as the crescendo approached, and he came with a soundless gasp as the peak of the song thundered through his frame. 

They shifted as the sound demanded - not the words but the imperative of all that perfection. They wove themselves together just as Dewachen wove himself into himself, revealing unity and wholeness with every perfect utterance. Damus suckled at Pharma's cable as if the muted, mysterious chords could be drawn out of the tip like nectar, and when his partner cried out alongside their third lover, their virtuoso, Damus knew that the taste of him was just as the music should taste. 

When the music rose in glorious roars, their climaxes were so fierce and hard that they could hear each other's components straining between their hips. When it settled low and soft, they finished with only a trembling and an all-devouring bliss. When the songs turned mournful, they sheltered in their shared warmth, shielding each other against their grief. They had moved from couch to floor to walls to bed to walls and floor again. Even the dripping of their mingled fluids across their bodies fell into the rhythm of the voice, and they reverently cupped the bright trails in their hands and painted each other with their beauty, wearing shining spirals and jags upon their armor as they made love. 

And near the end, when the blazing choir stripped them to a crystalline nakedness, a brightness that made them feel as if they knew each other to be as transparent as glass, it was only natural for their chestplates to move aside and bare what the music had already bared. They pressed their sparks together within the delicate weave that surrounded them and knew each other fully, knew how the other embodied the music, and the experience flowed back and forth between them in an ever-building loop until, still entwined, they fell down into the soundless dark. 

When they woke, an unknown amount of time later, they were balled up together on the floor, every limb wrapped tight around each other. Creaking with strained joints, they wordlessly untwisted themselves, taking note of how coated in congealed fluids they both were. Their chests were closed, allowing them to mutually and silently agree to forget what might have happened in that sweet and fragile moment. Hastily, they hid their arrays and avoided eye contact. 

By unspoken agreement, Pharma was the first to haul himself to his feet and shower alone. Damus sat on the floor, arms wrapped around his lifted knees, hugging himself as if trying to recapture something that had irretrievably escaped him. The concert was long over, and there was no sound from the speakers. 

When Damus emerged from his turn in the shower, he found that Pharma had mixed them both breakfast, setting the cubes on either side of the kitchen island. Seeing that arrangement made Damus pause and feel a pang inside his spark. Pharma was fussing too much over at his preparation area, as if it was somehow very time-consuming to put away all the supplements he'd used. 

Damus thought of sitting down on one of the stools by the island, but then recalled that he was a warbuild and the stools seemed made for typical civilian weights. The implied rejection stung him, and he vaguely began to remember that injustice existed and that he was the victim of it. Remembering that made him feel like he was sliding even farther down from a height that he had no wish to leave. He just stayed standing and sipped at the relatively low-powered blend, not looking at the jet's back. 

Pharma finally finished his rearranging and came almost reluctantly over to the island, sitting down across from his guest and also sipping steadily without looking up. They finished in silence, at almost exactly the same time, and Pharma reached out— Damus wanted to interpret the gesture as something different, but he only put his empty cube in Pharma's hand. He stood awkwardly, fingers interlaced on the counter to keep himself from fidgeting, as Pharma turned away again and began to wash the cubes out in the sink. 

He let his gaze wander across the living room and kitchen, trying to find some other place to put his eyes that was not on his...host. (Not friend. Not anything else.) The silent stereo happened to catch his attention. He emitted a little snow from his vocalizer to break the silence gently before adding the weight of words. "Thank you," he said softly. 

Pharma was slow to answer, as if he also wanted to keep their silence whole. "You're welcome," he replied, softly as well. He cleared his vocalizer a little, as if rust had settled there, and continued, "You can take the whole drive with you when you leave. It's full anyway." 

"I will. Thank you." Yes, that was right. He had nineteen more concerts to listen to still. Their transaction had been fulfilled; everything that they had arranged was finished. Slowly, he went to the stereo and began to carefully unplug the bootleg drive from it, wishing that he had the internal mods himself to cradle it deep in his torso. Back in the kitchen, Pharma was taking far, far too long to rinse out a pair of cubes, busily clattering around in the sink as if he needed to keep the silence broken now that it was over. 

Damus weighed the drive in his hand as if he could almost feel the heft of the beauty trapped inside of it. He felt oddly reluctant to go away and listen to it all on his own, as if something would be lost without having another there to share the experience with. Maybe someone else, maybe Lord Megatron (he remembered that he loved Lord Megatron) - but no, Lord Megatron (somehow less glorious than before) did not appreciate neoclassical music. Perhaps he would make the time to listen politely, but...he could listen, but he would not _hear._ Not like... 

"I don't want to go," he said quietly, finally lifting his head to look directly at Pharma's back. 

He saw Pharma try to disguise the shaking of his hands as he picked up a kitchen towel and elaborately wiped the solvent off of the sink. The jet laughed a little shakily, "What do you mean, you don't want to go." 

"Just that. I want to stay with you." 

Pharma slowly left the kitchen and approached the sitting area, keeping the couch between himself and where Damus stood by the stereo. The towel was still tangled around his hands. "I...saw in your spark, when we..." He swallowed heavily. "You're a terrorist." 

"A Decepticon," Damus corrected, though he felt oddly incapable of being furious over the accusation. He couldn't find a way to be furious at Pharma. "And you're a member of the elite. An oppressor." 

Pharma tried to unsteadily meet Damus' eyes. "Well. It sounds like we're more or less on the same page, then." 

He was certainly correct. They were both clear about their mutual enmity, ideologically and socially. They should be pleased to part. Yet Pharma continued to dart little uncomfortable glances at Damus and the front door, as if he were dreading the intersection of those two things and would rather look at his hands so that he wouldn't have to see it. Damus watched him steadily, making his disinterest in the door clear. "I know it," he finally said. "But I love you." 

Pharma covered his mouth with a hand and kept blinking fast. "You're—" He steadied his voice. "You know that it's stupid. It can't work—" 

"People have bonded over stupider things. I'm not asking you to take vows with me. I only want to be with you. I don't want to leave." 

The hand hesitantly lowered from Pharma's mouth and he kept his eyes downward, as if afraid to watch Damus' response. "And I...don't want you to leave either. I think I..." He looked up, trying to speak with his gaze. 

Damus smiled. "Someday you'll be able to say it." He trusted that that would happen. 

Pharma smiled back and stepped around the couch. He walked over to where Damus stood beside the precious stereo and took his hand, and they looked into each other's eyes. 

In time, they adopted some of the crystal anemones that had been conceived where their relationship was born.

**Author's Note:**

> = I am absolutely guilty of writing care sheets for my animals that have their own appendices.


End file.
